BY ERIC KING
The contents of Facebook ’s “Trending” section have been revealed to be curated by human editors, not computer algorithms.
UK Guardian newspaper revealed on Thursday that Facebook “relies heavily on the intervention of a small editorial team” to determine which headlines make it to the Trending module. The curation guidelines say:
“In the Story, content is researched and curated by Facebook’s editorial team with the goal of providing a balanced variety of high quality content on the subject from applicable sources.
“A second team, the Search Ranking Analysts (SRAs), works in tandem with the editorial team to research and surface potential content” for the module.
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A former Facebook contractor who previously worked as a news curator told Gizmodo this week that his colleagues would remove right-wing topics such as Mitt Romney, Rand Paul and the Conservative Political Action Conference from the site’s Trending news list, even though they were popular enough to qualify.
“I believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news,” he added
This means Facebook super team actively regulate those topics that make up their trending news. This fact may seem scandalous at first sight, but such is the task of an editorial team- responsibly determining those topics that deserve to dominate the news.
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In order to qualify for the Trending list, Facebook’s guidelines for US editors recommended looking at only ten news sources.
The Guardian told The eye of media.com that the guidelines ”show human intervention and therefore editorial decisions at almost every stage of Facebook’s new operation.
The guidelines “show human intervention – and therefore editorial decisions – at almost every stage” of Facebook’s news operation, The Guardian revealed. A team of news editors working in shifts were instructed on how to “inject” stories into the module, but also“blacklist” topics for removal, over reasons left to the editors’ discretion.
The facebook guideline continues:
“We measure this by checking if it is leading at least 5 of the following 10 news websites: BBC News, CNN, Fox News, the Guardian, NBC News, The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Yahoo News or Yahoo,” says the document quoted by The Guardian.
Making reference to 1,000 trusted sources, facebook bosses stated:
“In our guidelines, we rely on more than a thousand sources of news – from around the world, and of all sizes and view points to help verify and characterize world events and what people are talking about,” said Justin Osofsky, Facebook’s VP of Global Operations. Editors were said to have been tasked with the responsibility of spotting potentially big news stories that emerge outside Facebook by using an algorithm that trawls more than a thousand automated feeds that include competing news sites.
CLAIMS
However, he vehemently denied claims made by former editors of facebook that they insert stories artificially into trending topics or instruct their reviewers to do so. That would be unethical and wrong, so let’s hope the former editors had are somehow wrong about this.
Now that Facebook trending section is now confirmed to be curated by humans, the situation is clarified.
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Pic- Facebook.com
